Folk, Jazz etc: Smashing sounds from Gateshead’s Bottle Bank writer

THIS Bottle Bank is not about recycling – unless you mean, of course, the way that a good tune gets played over and over again down the generations.

The Bottle Bank in question was one of the many hornpipes written by or attributed to the Scots-born fiddler James Hill, who frequented the rumbustious keelmen’s howffs of early 19th-century Newcastle and Gateshead, and whose music remains a vigorous presence in the repertoires of not just North-east English and Scots fiddle players, but Northumbrian pipers.

The tune is one of three Hill compositions which feature on a fine new solo album by the Northumbrian fiddler Stewart Hardy, Hawthorn’s Sweeter Shade (Hooky Mat Records). He takes it at the sort of unsteady ambulation one might associate with a man having some difficulty reconciling direction and gravity on the steep Gateshead street that gives The Bottle Bank its name.

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The street’s numerous hostelries included the Hawk, in which, in one census, Hill was recorded as living, and which may be the inspiration for one of his most famous hornpipes, The Hawk, which, along with classics like The High Level Bridge and The Beeswing still jiggles many a fiddler’s elbow to this day.

Hill can prove a slippery character for would-be biographers. While census records and death certificate (he succumbed to TB aged just 41, probably while in prison for debt) record him as a Scots musician, no record of his birth (c 1811) has been found, although tradition suggests he may have hailed from Dundee.

“Part of the appeal of Hill, apart from his tunes, is the fact that he is very hard to pin down,” Hardy says, “also how he crosses the Border, coming from the North-east Scots fiddle tradition. Dundee still seems the best bet, but until we’ve nailed down a birth certificate, we can’t say absolutely.”

In agreement is Graham Dixon, a Northumbrian piper based in Pathhead, Midlothian, who is working on a revised edition of a book he published on Hill 25 years ago, The Lads Like Beer, which has long been out of print.

Dixon confirms that his researches for the book, which should appear in the summer or autumn of this year, have still failed to come up with a birth certificate.

Interestingly, Dixon did come across an 1851 census record suggesting that the Aberdeenshire fiddler Peter Milne, the renowned “Tarland Minstrel” and mentor to the great James Scott Skinner, was living at the time in a Gateshead pub owned by a violin-maker. “That,” he says, “would explain the links with Scott Skinner, who played Hill’s tunes.”

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Dixon is compiling an album of Hill tunes to be released in association with the book and has already recruited fiddlers of the calibre of Hardy, Chuck Fleming, Greg Lawson and Pete Clark. In the meantime, Hardy appears with his frequent playing partner, Scots guitarist and piper Frank McLaughlin, at Celtic Connections tonight in a Mitchell Theatre concert celebrating the Songs of Robert Tannahill.

Quite apart from the Hill tunes, Hawthorn’s Sweeter Shade, as the 47-year-old Hardy suggests in the sleeve notes, features the kind of beautifully considered playing that sits more comfortably in a quiet space than in a frenetic session. Hardy gets to grips with lesser heard material from both sides of the Cheviot divide – some of it spirited enough, such as a set of venerable triple hornpipes, or another brisk set which includes Jacob – allegedly a favourite of the writer Thomas Hardy (no relation), himself no mean fiddler. But it is the slow airs that really bring out the sweetness of Stewart Hardy’s playing, as in the album’s title track and such choice Scots airs as Niel Gow’s Lament for his Second Wife and Rosslyn Castle.

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As for James Hill, he may remain, to some extent, traditional fiddle music’s man of mystery, but there’s no doubt as to the enduring presence of his music.

• For further information see www.stewarthardy.co.uk

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